Water desalination as a possible opportunity for the GT- and H2-MHR
- Energy Applications and Systems, Inc., 7982 Chaucer Drive, Weeki Wachee, FL 34607 (United States)
- General Atomics, 3550 General Atomics Court, San Diego, CA 92121 (United States)
There is growing concern that many areas of the world are suffering ongoing and increasing water shortages. Much of this concern is manifested in the United Nation's World Water Assessment Programme, the results of which were published in the spring of 2003. Other researchers have corroborated the findings of this work. However, while the UN has characterized water availability as a 'crisis', this view would seem to be excessive. Nevertheless, many parts of the world, particularly in developing nations inclusive of the middle east, are experiencing severe water stress and some of these have embarked on large-scale seawater desalination projects. The current work explores, in a preliminary way, the application of high temperature helium cooled reactors in either an electricity or a hydrogen production mode for desalination. Three desalination technologies are discussed: reverse osmosis (RO) and thermal processes using either Multi-stage flash distillation (MSF) or Multi-effect distillation (MED). For the latter, it is found that the waste heat rejected from a high temperature reactor comes in power levels and temperatures reasonably well suited for desalination. An economic comparison was made using the best available data and scaling to compare the processes. What was found that reverse osmosis and thermal distillation possess comparable costs within the error bars of the analysis but that the former generally resulted in slightly lower costs. Thus the choice between them can be made with other criteria such as feed salinity and product quality. It was also found that desalinated water co-produced with either electricity (RO and MED) or hydrogen (MED) are expected to cost about the same. Since hydrogen and desalinated water can be produced off the grid, this co-production architecture appears attractive for the early deployment of high temperature helium cooled reactors. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21160777
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ICAPP'04: 2004 international congress on advances in nuclear power plants, Pittsburgh, PA (United States), 13-17 Jun 2004; Other Information: Country of input: France; 6refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2004 international congress on advances in nuclear power plants - ICAPP'04, 2338 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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